How eBay Drop Shipping Saved My Life!!!

Many of you guys reading this may know this story, but if I have done my job right, MOST of you reading this do not.

Short back Story….

I grew up in the Twin Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, went to the US to study Mathematics when I was 18, and since then I have lived in 7 different countries. My eBay Drop Shipping story began in 2011 in Jaco Costa Rica when I woke up and found myself with $200 ($59,800 less than I had when I got there) and rent to pay in a week. I needed a little more time to get myself back on my feet so I reached out to a friend Delroy, a Jamaican Internet Marketer living in San Jose, Costa Rica. He told me I can come and stay with him for two weeks for free but after those two weeks I will have to pay my share of $900 a month of rent. In my preparation to move, I had reached out to a number of friends in my circle to find out if they knew of anyway for me to make money online. That first day of awakening was spent looking for Remote Jobs online and even applying to a number of them on Craigslist.

Two days later an ex-client and reader of a finance blog I use to run reached out to me and said that he got into eBay Drop Shipping and was selling about 1 item a week and he knew that I was a relatively smart guy so maybe I may want to take a look at it. We came to an agreement that I will use his account, since it was a big account, and try to grow it and we will split the profits.

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So eBay Hustle Begins…

So at this point I had 18 days to come up with $900, an eBay Account to do it with and ZERO training. We had a quick call and Greg explained to me that he was simply going to Amazon and finding items that were top sellers and then just created an eBay listing to sell the same item at a higher price on eBay.com. This made ZERO fucking sense in my head and I could not for the life of me figure out why someone will buy an item on eBay for more than it was selling for on Amazon, but Greg was doing it and selling 1 item a week and I had nothing to lose and no time to question this MADNESS so my first goal was to figure out a more effective way to choose items to sell on eBay and a systematic was of pricing these items, without simply raising the price and hoping that the item sold.

DAY 1, 18 DAYS and $200 Left

Step 1. Analyzing the Account I was using…

So I had Greg’s account and I spent some time analyzing it to try to find a pattern of what sold. Just go go over some statistics… He has over 900 eBay listings up and was selling 1 item a week. The majority of his items were below $50 and all of them were top selling items in their respective categories but it was clear to be that Greg’s Titles were horrible and the items that sold had no sort of commonality in the type of products they were.

DAY 2. 17 DAYS and $200 Left

Step 2. Analyzing the Marketplace…

Greg mentioned to me a number of times that there were many people making a full-time income Drop Shipping on eBay . My thought process at that point was “If I can only find someone selling many items on eBay, I can sell the same items and maybe I will make some money”. Remember that I was not confident that all of this even worked, but if someone else was doing it, nothing was stopping me from doing the same. I spent the next 3 days trying to find items that were selling on eBay that I could find cheaper on Amazon and then, I was making a list of the sellers who were doing this “Amazing Feat”. In all of this searching, what I did notice; which will help me a lot later on; is that if I search a seller and list look at the listings that were completed in the last 15 days, ALL the listings that were successfully sold, showed up in green.

DAY 5, 14 DAYS and $190 Left

In the beginning, I started off by finding as many competing Drop Shippers as I can and adding them to my list. This process was done by searching for random items on ebay, example: Mens Mountain Bike

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Go Through each Listing 1 by 1, doing a Search for the descriptions of the listings, and if I find the same item on another retailer’s website (Amazon, Walmart, Target), I will save the name of the seller selling the item to a list of mine.

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Found the seller’s listing and taking a note of his name

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In this case Amazon had it for less.

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I started off by spending half a day building a list of 20 eBay users that were using this Drop Shipping method.

I then spend the next 5 days copying every one of their listings that sold and added the exact listing to my account with a price a couple cents lower than the one I stole. By the 5 day I had listed a little over 100 items using this manual method and I got my FIRST SALE and I had made $3 profit on that sale.

DAY 10, 9 DAYS and $103 Left…

At this point I got all the confirmation that I need in the world to know that this worked so I simply had to keep listing and sales should come in. I was noticing listings getting Views and Watchers and I had a sale do I was clearly doing something right.

I spent the next 9 days repeating the same listing process as described above, and I was able to list over 400 listings and I had made my first $100 Drop Shipping on eBay.

DAY 18, 0 DAYS and $57 Left…

It was now time to pay my $900 rent and after making a little over $100, moving, buying food and paying my cell phone bill, I was down to $57. I woke Delroy up early that morning and explained that I did not have the money, but I showed him the progress I made with this new business model and he gave me another month to pay but I would then have to pay $1800.

The month ended well and I am here today to tell the story with a new outlook on life.

I tell you all of this not to boast, but to assure you that if I could do it, from Costa Rica with no training and 3rd world internet, once you put in the time and implement a solid strategy, can can be successful at eBay Drop Shipping.

I passed up one of your videos last year, thinking here we go, “another guru”. Then after watching another 100 or so videos of other “e-commerce gurus” on how to make money, I realized, they’re all fluff and do the same thing. Show me a screenshot of sales and a Lambo. So lame!!! I came back aand watched a few of your videos and quickly came to the realization that I had just wasted 12 months that could’ve been spent drop shipping!